By Jacquie Foote Call it bread, bucks, clams, dough, loot,…
By Jacquie Foote Call it bread, bucks, clams, dough, loot, lucre, moola or smackers ... its money and it has been an important part of…
By Jacquie Foote
Call it bread, bucks, clams, dough, loot, lucre, moola or smackers … its money and it has been an important part of life in America since before there was a United States. Our feelings about it are to be found in the slang words themselves. Some, such as bread and dough, reflect the fact that, like bread, money is a staple of life. Others, such as bucks and clams, are thought to have originated as a tip of the hat to buckskins and clam (shells), which were once used as money. Loot and lucre originally meant ill-gained money (from the biblical expression filthy lucre 1 Timothy 3:3). Some words such as moola and smackers are of less certain origin. But they all mean money!
At the beginning in our country, money was in short supply. Where possible, barter was used. In other cases, Colonial governments used tobacco, nails and animal pelts as a sort of currency, assigning them a set value of shillings or pennies. The most successful substitute currency was wampum, a particular kind of bead made from the shells of ocean critters and already in use among some Indian tribes. Actually, wampum was so successful as currency that counterfeit wampum was made and passed off as the real thing. (They were produced by dyeing like-shaped shells with berry juice, mimicking the purple color of the real thing.)
It was a crew of Puritans from Boston who first put their faith in paper as currency. At first, the Massachusetts Bay Colony tried to issue colonial coinage. The pieces themselves, struck in 1652, were made from poor-quality silver and were soon outlawed by the British. Less than a decade later, the colonists tried again. (They were forced to because they owed money to the crown to help fund Britain’s war against France, yet lacked any currency with which to pay up.) They called the paper “bills of credit.” The local government essentially said to the people: Here, just use this. It’s real money … or as good as. We’ll sort out redeemability later.
There were endless debates about whether this paper was real money or just a smoke-and-mirrors scheme that would surely end badly. In what became the United States, the dispute between the fear of paper and the advantages of national currency would rage for more than a century. During the Continental Congress, the Founding Fathers deliberately forbad the nascent federal government from issuing “bills of credit.” Paper money, one delegate noted, was “as alarming as the Mark of the Beast.” When there was a Constitution, the currency issue was carefully addressed.
Think of it as a timeline …
1690 – Colonial Notes: In the early days of this nation, Americans used English, Spanish and French currencies. The Massachusetts Bay Colony, one of the Thirteen Original Colonies, issued the first paper money to cover costs of military expeditions. The practice of issuing paper bills spread to the other Colonies.
1739 – Franklin’s Unique Counterfeit Deterrent: Benjamin Franklin’s printing firm in Philadelphia printed Colonial bills with nature prints – unique raised impressions of patterns cast from actual leaves. This process was under-appreciated as such until centuries later.
1764 – British Ban: Following years of restrictions on Colonial paper currency, Britain finally ordered a complete ban on the issuance of paper money by the Colonies.
1775 – Continental Currency: American colonists issued paper currency for the Continental Congress to finance the Revolutionary War. The notes were backed by the anticipation of tax revenues. Without solid backing and because they were easily counterfeited, the notes quickly became devalued, giving rise to the phrase not worth a Continental.
1781 – The Nation’s First Bank: The Continental Congress chartered the Bank of North America in Philadelphia as the nation’s first real bank to give further financial support to the Revolutionary War.
1785 – The Dollar: The Continental Congress determined that the official monetary system would be based on the dollar. (The word dollar originally came from a Bohemian word thal meaning valley. A silver coin was minted in a certain Bohemian valley and became known as a thaler, which was pronounced by the English dollar.) The first coin representing the start of the American system was not struck for several years. Before that time, private bank-note companies printed a variety of notes.
1789 – The Adoption of the Constitution: After adoption of the Constitution in 1789, Congress chartered the First Bank of the United States and authorized it to issue paper bank notes to eliminate confusion and simplify trade. The bank served as the U.S. Treasury’s fiscal agent, thus performing the first central bank functions.
For information on the events at the Geauga County Historical Society’s Burton Century Village Museum, call 440-834-1492 or visit www.geauga
historical.org.
